The present disclosure relates to a cleaning device for use in an image forming apparatus, such as a copier or a printer, and an image forming apparatus with the cleaning device.
There is known, as a cleaning device for use in an image forming apparatus, such as a copier, a cleaning device including: a cleaning roller disposed in contact with the surface of a photosensitive drum as an image carrier and configured to remove toner from the surface of the photosensitive drum; a cleaning blade configured to scrape off toner from the surface of the photosensitive drum; and a toner layer restricting member configured to restrict the thickness of a layer of toner deposited on the cleaning roller. The cleaning roller has not only the function of removing toner from the surface of the photosensitive drum but also the function of retaining toner on the surface of the cleaning roller to form a layer of toner and polishing the surface of the photosensitive drum with the formed layer of toner. The toner layer restricting member extends in a direction along a rotational axis of the cleaning roller and is configured to restrict the layer of toner deposited on the cleaning roller to a uniform thickness.
When, in such a cleaning device, for example, an image of low coverage rate is continuously printed on a large number of print sheets or an image with the print position lopsided in the direction of the rotational axis of the photosensitive drum is repeatedly printed on a large number of print sheets, the layer of toner formed on the surface of the cleaning roller may partially lack in amount, resulting in failure in uniform polishing of the entire surface of the photosensitive drum and thus uneven polishing.
To cope with this, an improved cleaning device is proposed in which the aforementioned cleaning device further includes a toner supply roller configured to supply toner to the cleaning roller and a toner receiving member configured to receive toner and supply the received toner to the toner supply roller. Since this cleaning device can supply toner to the cleaning roller with the toner supply roller, it is described as capable of reducing the lack of toner in the layer of toner deposited on the surface of the cleaning roller.